Colibri, an Erasmus+ funded project, aims to improve the quality of academic offering through innovative teaching methods. It takes place in three consecutive years, offering one-semester courses for students from seven universities from all over Europe. This year´s midway seminar from 18 to 22 April in Barcelona supported the collaboration between as well as the personal guidance of the students.
The project is divided into two phases: The first three months are dedicated to ten online modules covering topics around the future internet. The second phase consists of project work where students from the different universities work together in groups on case studies – this phase started with the midway seminar. The two private enterprises in the partner consortium (aconium GmbH and Talaia Networks from Barcelona) as well as the National Hellenic Research Foundation (NHRF) from Athens provide these case studies. Within three months, the students work for example on new business models or improving already consisting business models. For this, they need to work remotely, e.g. by using Skype for online meetings or Google Docs for sharing documents. The students have to apply their knowledge from the online modules for working on the project proposals. The next physical meeting will take place in Hamburg in mid-July where the students present their case study results.
The partner consortium from the seven participating universities as well as aconium GmbH, Talaia Networks and NHRF took the advantage of the personal meeting to discuss further project steps, e.g. the dissemination plan and the evaluation of the modules as well as necessary steps after the end of the project duration. Besides providing two case studies, aconium is responsible for the quality assurance of the blended-learning project. Colibri runs until the end of August 2017.